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bow and arrow

A lot of people don’t like it. It’s a whole bunch of seemingly random big sticks in the middle of the newest roundabout that no one in Nashville can navigate.

Nashville traditionally doesn’t like new things. It’s in the midst of a personality crisis right now as throngs of ‘youths’ from California, New York and all points in between rush into our previously ‘big small town.’

Spending money on things like roundabouts and public art is not what old Nashville is about. In fact, there are still a group of Puritans who occasionally put clothes on the “Musica” statues they put in the middle of the old roundabout by Music Row. But the times, they are a changin.’

“Stix” is now Music City’s tallest (and most expensive) piece of public art. It is also our most interesting. The actual work was not done by an artist, but unconventionally by a power pole company, Rains Electric Company, based in Madison, TN. The German artist Christian Mueller created only the concept.

Mueller wanted the piece to pay homage to the Native American tribes who first walked and hunted the land on which we now each day wreck – literally. He relies on painted wood and natural colors like the Native tribes would have used in their art. There are native wild grasses that will grow underneath and the whole things glows at night. Mueller imagined the piece as arrows that had fallen from the sky, in a kind of dreamy battle of past and present.